Jitbit Blog about Customer Support

Email follow-ups are a growing trend in SaaS startups community — every successful founder I’ve met swears by it. At Jitbit we are no exception. Over the course of last two years we’ve sent thousands of emails to customers and prospects.

We’ve tried different types of follow-ups with different sequences — pretty much the same things that everyone else is doing. But lately I’ve come up with a follow-up that is five times more effective than anything else we’ve tried.

Our hosted help desk app was down for more than half an hour today. The outage affected all the services including the email-pickup modules and the web-app. During the outage anyone accessing the helpdesk app was getting a 503 "Service unavailable" error.

This is a real live chat log with Adobe customer support. A customer had a problem with Dreamweaver (the app was freezing every 20-30 seconds) so he decided to contact Adobe customer support department via their online helpdesk system. Someone named 'Vikas' responded to the ticket, but said his area is "installation and configuration only", so he couldn't help. The ones who could - were unavailable at the moment, "so please come back later". Our guy had waited 24 hours and wrote them back the next day. Here's what happened next:

We have finally released the first public Beta version of our Android app for the helpdesk ticketing system. The features are similar to the iPhone one, but you might experience some glitches, since it's our first public release.

When I first started my company 7 years ago I thought running a software startup is 80% about writing software. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the other way around. Coding takes only about 20%. The remaining 80% is marketing, team-management, SEO, product management, strategy, taxes/accounting, customer support, hiring/firing and a hundred other things a typical programmer knows nothing about. And likes nothing about - to an average programmer most of these activities are dull and boring.

Let’s be honest, we put marketing and development first and everything else second. Despite the overall positive trend, customer support is still an afterthought for most small SaaS companies and that is a huge mistake.

I know, the only thing that could convince founders to do something nowadays is numbers and data, which is perfectly fine. That is exactly what I’m going to do – I’m going to use numbers to convince you to invest in customer support

When we talk about, say, “new customers per month”, it’s perfectly clear what we need to do to increase that number: we need to get more people into the funnel or optimize the funnel itself, right? Things are not that obvious when we deal with the churn rate.

In February 2013 Amy Hoy has shut down "Charm" - her web-based help desk app. The primary reason for the shutdown was high availability requirement (since downtime is not an option for a helpdesk app) and the product becoming too demanding in terms of server architecture and monthly bills. To sum up - it stopped being fun and became an engineering PITA.